Because I just want to do my part for Rick Santorum to help establish what it is that Santorum is all about. Because the all the other stuff showing up on google now is really beside the point of santorum.

In other words, no more Amazon. Don't give them money. By all means go there, look at their stuff, using their shopping tools.

But when it comes down to actually making a purchase, don't give them money. Give it to anybody else. Yes, even Barnes & Noble. But preferrably click that link to the right that says "Shop Indie Bookstores."

I have it on good authority that Eric is both back from South Mezcalistan or wherever he was and has finished writing some novel length Lemony Snicket slash fic project that has been taking up a bunch of his time lately. So don't ask me why he hasn't posted anything here in a while. Because frankly, I have too much else to do, and until the Quiet American sends me something more substantive I'm not even going to lazily post some of that crazy bitch's ramblings again. And god knows where fucking Borgnine has disappeared to.

Which is to say, glad you're back, E, but high time you started entertaining us again.

On October 4, 1957 the American went Quiet. So no, contrary to what you may believe we were not born in December 1955.

We lived though deep in the desert. Out at the Nevada Test Range where the long silver cock of our father was born.

That is the paranoia we were birthed in.

The long flights led to what should have defused the paranoia in which we were conceived. There was no bomber gap. Before 1957 there was no rocketry gap. By START there was no evidence of a missile gap.

This was the cranking of the military industrial complex. The gears of the Atomic Energy Commission turning the flywheel of the U-2 leaping out from Area 51 and terrifying the world that there were space aliens at Groom Lake.

Just received my courtesy copy of a book I'm in. It's called the Modern Library Book of New York Diaries and it has diary excerpts from New Yorkers going back to 1609. They included an excerpt from my much reblogged post about 9/11, written on 9/12.

I got another one of these emails. I'm just going to keep posting them I guess unless they get too bizarre, because, frankly, I want to see where this guy (girl?) is going with all of this. If he's going anywhere.

The Quiet American Sleeps Sound

The sound might carry. This might institute a carrier wave. There may in waves be found the waving of a flag, a glove, a skirt, a handkerchief.

Handkerchief used to be two words. The Quiet American has always been three.

The Quiet American is also one.

There are moments in which the behavior of an individual is a fractal representation of the behavior of a society.

Consider the individual following slowly the actions of the group, moving steadily into synch but accelerating.

This is following and it is a form of invisibility.

Consider the individual as he begins to catch up and move simultaneous with the whole. In so doing he becomes indistinguishable from the whole.

This is one form of invisibility.

Consider the individual so adept at imitation that he begins to anticipate the moves. He moves before the society moves. The society is now following him.

Despite appearances, this is an illusion. This is also a form of invisibility.

The individual is only visible when his movement is contrapuntal and harmonic with but separate from the movement of the whole.

This is the essence of what follows.

An essence exists but not prior to existence. This is what Jean-Paul thought he proved. But Jean Paul was not the Quiet American. He was not even American. Jean-Paul was French.

This was emailed to me with the subject "for wetasphalt." The return address was info at wetasphalt.com and the whole thing was in plain ascii text with no signature or any other identifying marks I could discern. Additionally, when I tracked back the IP addresses it seemed to have been sent from a remailer running on a BSD machine somewhere in Indiana connected to the internet via an inflight wi-fi service used by a number of commercial airlines. That is where the trail ends. I don't know quite what to make of it, but I found the whole thing pretty interesting so I figured what the fuck, I'll publish it. I have corrected some punctuation here and there, and fixed numerous spelling errors (so many that a big part of me suspects that Eric is the one that sent it to me, although the obsessive interest in aesthetic moments would seem to indicate this is the product of EL Borgnine, although I'm pretty sure it's not him. If it is, well, it's nuttier than it seems). It is otherwise unaltered from the text as it was sent to me:

The Quiet American Grows Quieter.

Consider that the avant garde is over. Whether you believe this or not is immaterial. Hold it in your mind like a crystal of hypothetical possibility that may or may not explain the prismatic severing of the world you live in. Consider that it is over.

If it is over, then it is in fact not a sociological or cultural occurrence. It is rather a historical occurrence.

If it is historical, it is fixed in spacetime at some point and with some people in some shared past that we are remembering and talking about but not ourselves experiencing. All of this follows from the nature of history.